It's for people not making enough money (or not having the clue) to hire systems talent.
If you read the Moz report, they appear to have gotten a new CEO and are now building out a datacenter presence. They spent 7MM+/yr on AWS in 2013, there is no way that won't be viciously slashed by renting racks.
> It's for people not making enough money (or not having the clue) to hire systems talent.
That may be true compared to doing your own racks, but not compared to renting managed servers at a monthly basis.
Every time I price out AWS vs alternatives, I end up with the same: If you need a server for more than about 8 hours a day, renting a managed server at a monthly basis tends to come out substantially cheaper. And that doesn't increase sysadmin workload; in fact many hosting providers now offers APIs for provisioning monthly billed services too, just generally with lead times in hours instead of minutes/seconds, so it takes really bursty traffic before taking the hassle of auto-scaling with cloud instances becomes worthwhile.
If you read the Moz report, they appear to have gotten a new CEO and are now building out a datacenter presence. They spent 7MM+/yr on AWS in 2013, there is no way that won't be viciously slashed by renting racks.